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Chapter 17. Disrupting Washington’s Golden Rule

Ellen S.Miller

Note

This chapter was written before the Supreme Court’s decision on
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission changed the campaign
finance landscape.

Washington’s golden rule is different from the one we all learned
growing up: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In fact,
Washington’s golden rule—“He who has the gold, rules”—works in opposite
fashion.

That’s not news. The fact that big money drives government decisions,
that it has created a mercenary culture in which nearly everything appears
to be for sale, has been true of our nation since its founding. Whether it’s
information, access to lawmakers and elected officials, legislation, or
government spending, an exclusive group of moneyed insiders have outsized
influence. There are, of course, many channels for money to influence
outcomes, most notably campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.
There are also a multitude of ways this group of insiders gets
rewarded—contracts to consulting firms, special earmarks for government
spending, targeted tax breaks, and corporate subsidies. But the result is
the same: those who give, get. Ordinary people—“outsiders”—are excluded from
this cozy little game.

But now there is a new challenge to this very old way of doing
things.

With the rise of the Internet and the social Web, the outsiders are
becoming “insiders”—or, to be clearer, the barriers to entry are falling,
the gatekeepers are losing their power to control access, and thus the
golden rule is being disrupted. Thomas Jefferson once remarked, “Information
is power.” In large part, the highly paid “insider” lobbyists in Washington
work to help their clients to not just gain access to lawmakers, but perhaps
as importantly, shape, obtain, and make sense of crucial government
information. Lobbyists are the ones who can get their hands on copies of
proposed legislation hot off the printing press before anybody else. They
can help craft language for an earmark funding a pet project and make sure
it gets sponsored by a lawmaker and dropped into some massive spending bill.
They can interpret the minutiae of some government agency’s contracting
rules and shepherd a client through the thicket. Indeed, the need for this
kind of assistance has become so de rigueur that even state and local
governments have sometimes taken to hiring highly paid lobbyists to help
them negotiate the mysteries of Washington. With a government opaque to all
but the “insiders,” outsiders—read, ordinary people—rarely have a chance to
engage.

In a generation that is growing up with the Internet, however, the
“outsiders” have a different kind of expectation: they expect information to
be fully available 24/7, and they expect technology to allow them to engage
with their friends, communities, and elected officials. If you can sit
thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C., in a coffee shop with free
WiFi found via a few clicks on Google Maps; if you can then do simple
searches about particular health care statistics on where you live, such as
the number of people who lack health care insurance and how much cash local
hospitals and clinics are getting from Medicaid and Medicare; if you can dig
around to see how much campaign cash your senator and representative have
taken from the health care industry and how they have voted on key health
care issues—well then, you have essentially become your own lobbyist,
gathering the information you need to make your case to your elected
representatives. If your lawmaker is on Twitter or Facebook or whatever the
next revolution in the social web will be, you can communicate directly with
your representatives and hold them accountable for their actions. This
information shift works in both directions, by the way. Thanks to emerging
technology, lawmakers and government officials will have access to
increasingly sophisticated tools that help them aggregate and analyze the
views of their constituents and connect directly to you. They also will not
need to rely as much on intermediaries for information on what people care
about. A systemic change in how Washington works is now possible.

We are only just beginning to see the potential benefits of this new
age. James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution, wrote:

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of
acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their
own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge
gives.

A more transparent government will not be the panacea for all that
ails us. Our democracy will remain as messy as the founders expected and
ensured it would be. But in this revolution there is finally the potential
to subvert the “golden rule” of Washington—to turn government inside
out.

The Bad Old Days: When Insiders Ruled

When it comes to transparency of information, there have never been
any good old days. Even now, as the Obama administration is laying out an
ambitious transparency agenda, we are just beginning to understand how
little information is made available online—the modern-day definition of
transparency. But just as in the age of the automobile it’s difficult to
grasp what it was like to plan a trip across the country by stagecoach and
train, or how impossible it was to get an idea to a faraway audience
before the printing press, in the time of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube,
Google, and more, it’s easy to forget the really bad old days of truly
opaque government.

It helps to take a time machine back via the Sunlight Foundation’s
Transparency
Timeline. Much of the openness about Congress’s doings that we now
take for granted was hard to come by.

What were they talking about?

If you wanted to follow congressional debate but couldn’t make
it to the nation’s capital to see it in person, you were out of
luck. It wasn’t until the 1820s that Congress made its debates
public, long after the fact, in the “Annals of Debates.” It was
nearly 100 years after the Declaration of Independence, in 1873,
that Congress finally established the Congressional
Record. It would be another 122 years (1995) before the
text became available online for anybody with a computer and modem
to access.

Who was giving them campaign cash?

Big campaign donors have always known how much money they gave
to politicians—but the rest of us didn’t. While some scattershot
rules required disclosure of limited information about campaign
contributions, it took the biggest political scandal of all time—Watergate—for Congress to start
disclosing comprehensive information about who was funding
campaigns. Until 1995, however, this information was available only
in cumbersome hard-copy files. In 2001, the U.S. Federal Election
Commission (FEC) required House candidates to file campaign reports
electronically. Even to this day, U.S. senators refuse to file their
campaign finance records electronically. Instead, the FEC has to
take hard-copy records and have staff members type information into
a database, causing a substantial delay in transparency and at
substantial cost to taxpayers.

Are they invested?

It wasn’t until the late 1970s that members of Congress began
disclosing their personal finances, including the gifts they
received and travel they took on the dime of outside sources. Even
then, the information was available only in clunky paper formats. It
would have to wait until 2006, until the Center for Responsive
Politics (CRP) began making these forms available in PDF format on
its website. More recently, CRP has made them available in
searchable format (see Chapter 21).

Of course, it’s not just Congress that has specialized in opacity.
Myriad government agencies, at taxpayer expense, collect and produce
dizzying amounts of data about our economy, food and drug safety, and
environment—indeed, every aspect of our lives. Yet in the past, most of
this information remained piled up in dusty docket rooms deep inside
cement edifices. Taking this data and making it available at a high price
for those that could pay became a highly lucrative business.

It was only little more than a decade ago, for example, that the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began making corporate
financial data—annual reports and other filings—available online. Before
that, this information was the province of a small group of politically
connected database vendors. Carl Malamud, public domain advocate and
founder of Public.Resource.Org, essentially
shamed the government into making this information available. He did this
by putting the information up on the Internet himself. Once the site
became popular, he told the SEC that he would take it down, but would
first train the agency on how to continue to provide the data itself. The
SEC bowed to the public pressure he marshaled, and now we have EDGAR,
where anybody can look up corporate filings for free. Malamud ran a
similar campaign to get the U.S. Patent Office to put the text of patents
online.

This Is the Mashable Now

In the past, it was a victory simply to get Congress and government
agencies to disclose information on paper. Then came the Internet, which,
particularly in its beginnings, meant government could conduct a
“paper-style” kind of disclosure—with unwieldy PDFs, for example. Now
we’re in a new era, with increasing amounts of information made available
in raw, machine-readable format. Every day, new experiments bloom that are
helping to turn outsiders into insiders.

For years, the CRP
was a lonely voice, doing the hard work of collecting and coding campaign
contribution and lobbying data, and making it publicly available online
for reporters, researchers, and activists. Now, thanks to support from
Sunlight, CRP has made this data available via APIs and downloadable
databases so that anybody can take it, enhance it, and link it to other
information. Already, the group MAPLight.org has taken this campaign
finance data and mashed it up with congressional votes so that anybody can
find out quickly how money may have influenced a lawmaker’s actions (see
Chapter 20). Now, creative developers are
creating new interfaces, such as “Know thy Congressman” (a winner in the
Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America contest; http://know-thy-congressman.com/), which combines CRP’s
information on campaign contributions with data from elsewhere on earmarks
and biographical and legislative information. New venues bring this
information alive for different audiences. For example, remember during
the 2008 elections the wild popularity of The Huffington Post’s “FundRace”
feature, fueled directly from FEC downloads, which people could use to
look up who had given contributions to a particular presidential candidate
via an interactive map? Millions of people went to check on their
neighbors’ political giving histories.

What Malamud did for the SEC and the Patent Office, he also recently
did for congressional video. His campaign reached a tipping point after
C-SPAN tried to stop House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from posting C-SPAN
hearing footage on her website. Bloggers, led by Malamud, protested
online. In March 2007, C-SPAN responded by liberalizing its copyright
policy and opening up its archives. The result is that now bloggers,
citizen journalists, and anyone can post any federally sponsored event
covered by C-SPAN online without fear of copyright reprisals, allowing
websites such as Metavid.org to focus more on the application layer,
building interfaces for remixing, contextualizing, and participating with
the audio/video media assets of our government. As a result, it’s now
possible for anyone to find, annotate, tag, clip, and display a snippet of
video of lawmakers speaking from the floor of Congress on a particular
bill or topic.

Providing this kind of information isn’t just an exercise in
entertainment. It helps citizens become more involved and hold government
accountable. In 2005, a coalition of bloggers known as the “Porkbusters”
was behind efforts to help expose Alaska’s so-called “Bridge to Nowhere.”
This transportation project in Alaska to connect the tiny town of
Ketchikan (population 8,900) to the even tinier Island of Gravina
(population 50) cost some $320 million and was funded through three
separate earmarks in a highway bill. The same group helped expose which
senator—former Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alas.—had put a secret hold on a bill
creating a federal database of government spending, cosponsored by none
other than then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.
Recently, the Sunlight Foundation launched Transparency Corps, where
people can volunteer small amounts of time to help enhance the
transparency of government data. The first project underway—Earmark Watch—is helping to
digitize earmark data, which lawmakers are making available but only in
awkward formats. Armed with easily searchable data, citizens will be
better equipped to track government spending on these projects.

OpenCongress.org is another example of making information more
available so that citizens can digest and act on it. Through this
site—which provides baseline information about federal legislation along
with social networking features—users can sign up for tracking alerts on a
bill, a vote, or a lawmaker and link up with other people who are
interested in monitoring the same topics, monitor and comment on
legislation, and contact their members of Congress. In 2008, more than
45,000 people posted comments on legislation extending unemployment
benefits; first they used the OpenCongress platform as a way to press
their representative to vote for the legislation; then, once it was
enacted, they turned their comment thread into a de facto self-help group
for people looking for advice on how to get their state unemployment
agency to release their personal benefits. (Who needs lobbyists when you
have the power of many?) This spring the OpenCongress Wiki launched,
providing web searchers an entry on every congressional lawmaker and
candidate for Congress by pulling together their full biographical and
investigative records. And that’s open for anyone to edit.

We’re starting to see change from without become change for within,
as government starts to move toward a more modern, twenty-first-century
understanding of its obligations to provide up-to-date, searchable online
information to the public. For example, FedSpending.org was the first
publicly available database on all government spending, created by the
nonprofit OMB Watch with support from Sunlight. Through it, citizens can
find out not only how much money individual contractors get, but also what
percentage of those contracts have been competitively bid. The database
has been searched more than 15 million times since its inception in the
fall of 2006. Its creation helped to prompt passage of the Coburn-Obama
bill mandating that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) create
a similar database. But instead of spending $14 million appropriated for
that task on re-creating the wheel the OMB ultimately struck a deal with
FedSpending.org to license the software to build the backbone of what is
today USASpending.gov, which provides citizens with easy access to
government contract, grant, and other award data.

Now, with the launch of Data.gov, the Obama administration is taking
government transparency to a new level. The site is still early in its
development, but the idea is sound: to provide a one-stop shop for all
government data. If successful, it will ultimately make hard-to-find,
obscure databases, once the province only of experts, much more
accessible. We can’t imagine yet what new uses people will come up with
for this information.

What Comes Next

Despite admirable advances in transparency, we have a long way to
go. We in the transparency community are working toward a time when there
will be one-click, real-time disclosure. That would mean that a person
could search corporations such as Exxon and find out, in an instant, the
campaign contributions made at both the federal and state levels by its
Political Action Committee (PAC) and executives; who does its lobbying,
with whom they’re meeting, and what they’re lobbying on; whether it’s
employing former government officials, or vice versa; whether any of its
ex-employees are in government; and whether any of those people have flown
on the company’s jets. We will also know what contracts, grants, or
earmarks the company has gotten, and whether they were competitively
bid.

When we look up a senator, we will find an up-to-date list of his
campaign contributors—not one that is months out of date because the
Senate still files those reports on paper. The senator’s public calendar
of meetings will be online, so we can see which lobbyists are bending his
ear, as will a list of earmarks the senator has sponsored and obtained. We
will know what connections the lawmaker has to any private charity that
people might be funneling money to. Also online will be an up-to-date list
of the senator’s financial assets, along with all of the more mundane
things, such as a list of bills sponsored, votes taken, and public
statements made. Notably, all of this will be made available in a timely
fashion.

We would like to see information about Congress linkable to agency
data. That way, we could find out, easily, whether a lawmaker who received
mega contributions from electric utilities and voted a certain way on an
energy bill also has plants in his district and how much pollution they
emit. We could see how many people in a congressional district were
sickened by the latest outbreak of Salmonella or
E. coli, how that representative voted on food safety
legislation, and whether he attended a fundraiser hosted by a lobbyist for
a big food conglomerate.

Making information available was the first big step: being able to
connect the dots is the next crucial one. To make sense of information, we
need to be able to analyze how one data set relates to another as easily
as we search Google Maps for that coffee shop with free WiFi. The more
connections we can make between seemingly disparate data, the more
outsiders are invited inside, and the golden rule is subverted. A small
contractor who wants to get into government work has a better chance.
Citizens can help watchdog and cut down on wasteful spending. People can
find out about traffic fatalities in their neighborhoods,
government-sponsored clinical drug trials, and whether there’s been a
safety complaint about the toy they were planning to buy their kid. The
barrier for entry into policy debates will be much lower.

Sure, we will always need experts who have deep experience to help
explain what information means, to give it context. But in the future, it
will be a lot easier for journalists, academics, public interest
advocates, bloggers, and citizens directly to help
conduct these analyses themselves. That will mean a
healthier debate and, as a result, a fairer and more vibrant
democracy.

“The old paternalism said the world was way too complex, and that we
should trust the elders who have got the credentials to make the right
decisions,” said David Weinberger, author of Everything is
Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder,[164] at the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum conference. “But we’re
beyond a paper-based democracy now. The facts that are being given to us
are intended to keep us unsettled, because in the hyperlinked world of
difference, being unsettled, existing in chaos and constructive difference
and never-ending argument, is a far better approximation of reality than
the paper-based world could ever give us…. Transparency is the new
objectivity.”

The old paternalism is dying, but there is more work to be done,
because it’s in the interest of big money to try to get around
transparency efforts and work outside of public view. Transparency alone
will not create a democratic nirvana. But there is no denying that the
outsiders are becoming the new insiders, with the potential to rattle the
status quo in fundamental ways. In the immortal words of the venerable
Yoda, “Always in motion is the future.”

About the Author

Ellen S. Miller is the cofounder
and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based,
nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to
catalyze greater government openness and transparency. She is the founder
of two other prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of
money and politics—the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign—and is a nationally recognized
expert on transparency and the influence of money in politics. Her
experience as a Washington advocate for more than 35 years spans the
worlds of nonprofit advocacy, grassroots activism, and
journalism.

[164] Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New
Digital Disorder, David Weinberger, Times Books,
2007.

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